Why You Need To Track & Monitor Your Hashtags

March 7, 2017

Hashtag tracking is a topic a lot of companies are in the dark about. They use hashtags daily on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social networks, but their interaction with the hashtag ends there. They just hope their followers latch onto the hashtag and start using it in their own posts as a way to spread interest of their brand, but they don't have any tracking measures in place to see what, if any, impact those hashtags are having. Marie Ennis-O'Connor, a Social Media Strategist, provides 3 solid reasons why you should be tracking hashtags:

Connect with existing conversations and people who are tweeting about your topics of interest. With this data, you can identify current trends and key influencers.

Use hashtag analysis to measure and extend your social media reach.

Create more effective campaigns by measuring the level of interest, sentiment ("positive", "negative", or "neutral" attitudes), key demographics and influencers of your campaign. Use the findings to plan future campaigns.

The awesome thing about tracking your hashtags within Social Report is you can even see the actual search results of what people are saying about your hashtags and publish/share them on your social networks:

Curious who is using your hashtags the most? Social Report shows that, too!

As well as the most popular users who are using your hashtags. Note that some users only made a post or two, but because their audience is so large, they rank higher than users who have used your hashtag multiple times.

This effectively gives you all of the data you need to track and monitor your hashtags to give you an overall idea of the impact they are having on your social media strategy, including how popular the message is that you're pushing out. You can also set up these same search agents to track the hashtags your competitors are using to see how they measure in popularity in comparison to yours. Learning which social media users are using your competitors hashtags the most and who their most popular users are is key data to have.